A progressive political blog that highlights the infringement of religion upon today’s government.

The other day I wrote about Bush vetoing a highly popular water project bill. At the time I wrote that the bill would be overridden due to its extremely high support in both parties. Well, that veto override became official yesterday as the Senate voted 79 to 14. This follows a vote on Tuesday by the House to override the veto by 361-54.

The original votes were 81 to 12 and 381 to 40 or about 90% of all votes in favor. This percentage dropped to about 87% in the veto override. While this is still incredibly high, and way more than necessary to overturn the veto, it is surprising that such a popular bill saw a 3% drop in support. However despite this small drop in support I applaud the congress for standing up to a bully president who is all too happy to veto any helpful bills for political purposes.

I’m sure this administration will not miss the chance to attack the Democratic led congress for fiscal irresponsibility once again. But like before these attacks are very obviously partisan political ploys and not any real concern for fiscal responsibility. I wrote up a good article on the administration’s fiscal responsibility lies that I suggest to everyone. The summery is that Bush and his Republicans have destroyed Clinton’s budget surplus and ran up record deficits. Now as election season heats up they are hoping to pin the blame for their actions on the Democrats. I’m hoping the American people are smart enough to realize the deception. I just wish I had more confidence.

This veto override is the first for Bush, but if he continues to veto popular bills to score partisan political points it will surely not be his last. There are plenty more bills coming through Congress that have strong support in both parties that Bush is threatening to veto. I know that after running the country into the ground he is trying to save his legacy, but unless he wants his legacy to be overridden vetoes (to go along with his worst president ever legacy) he needs to start paying attention to what the people want; something he has made very clear that before now he has not done.

WIBW.com ran this AP story detailing that despite the Veteran’s Administration targeting services for homeless vets 1/4 of all homeless people in the US are veterans. What makes this figure particular staggering is that only 11% of our population are veterans.
It took about 10 years for homelessness to really become an issue for Vietnam veterans [...]

Today the House passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which would make it illegal for employers to discriminate in the processes of hiring, firing, promoting or paying an employee due to their sexual orientation. The one thing that this bill did not include was protection for transgendered individuals.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D,MA) will now introduce comparable legislation [...]

In a free country the government’s most important duty is to protect the civil liberties of its people. Secondary to that is the duty to protect its people. Countries where those two duties get mixed up quickly fall to fascism and dictatorship as civil liberties are destroyed in the name of “security”. [...]

Bush has vetoed a bill authorizing hundreds of important water related projects. This bill, like the SCHIP expansion, enjoyed strong bipartisan support and is highly popular. Unlike the last veto this bill looks to have the votes needed to hand Bush his first veto override. This bill passed the house and senate [...]